The venue was handled. The food was handled. The flowers were handled. The decorations were handled. The music was handled. The guest list was handled. The dress was handled. Charlie had picked out a second, considerably shorter and much more easily manageable dress to change into for the reception so she could actually dance without tripping over herself. They had a person lined up to do the actual ceremony. Most of the important parts were handled.
There was just one thing Charlie still had to worry about.
*
Of the myriad of things Charlie had always expected to ask Sam to do, this was not one of those things. It had never even crossed her mind before. Hell, she was pretty sure it had never even crossed Sam’s mind before, and she knew for a few that Sam was more of a romantic than she was, her vibrating not-a-boyfriend notwithstanding.
She didn’t ask immediately, though. She had to ease into it. Conversation was light at first, bouncing from movies to books to upcoming exhibits at the museum that they needed to pencil into their schedules, because Sam was generally pretty alright with letting Charlie be an art nerd and dragging her along for the ride.
It wasn’t until after they finished eating lunch and the waitress was sauntering away to bring their dessert orders to the kitchen that Charlie decided to get to it. “So—”
“Oh, good, are you finally going to tell me what all this is about?” Sam asked wryly.
Charlie wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out. “Yes, but you don’t need to be a dick about it,” she returned, her tone turning melodramatically haughty. “I need to ask you something.”
Sam leaned both elbows on the table and propped her chin up in her hands, leaning forward in a parody of attention. “I’m all ears.”
Charlie rolled her eyes and flicked a ripped-up piece of a paper napkin across the table at her. “You are such a bitch,” she snorted. “What if I need to talk about something serious? What then?”
“Then you’d be happy I’m trying to distract you with stupid shit,” Sam answered easily, and yeah, it was a fair point. Her eyebrows rose and she wondered, “Do you need to talk about something serious?”
“Sort of,” Charlie returned, stirring her straw in a circle in her soda. “I need a maid of honor,” she pointed out casually. “I figure you’re the only logical choice.”
Sam blinked slowly, once and then a second time, her expression going blank for a moment. And then she squealed as if she were trying to put a dog whistle to shame, clenching both of her hands together in front of her chest as she bounced in her seat. And then she squealed again just for good measure, albeit slightly quieter that time, before she finally squeaked out, “Of course I’ll be your maid of honor, you silly bitch! Why do you even need to ask?”
“That is generally the polite thing to do,” Charlie pointed out in return, folding her arms on the table and leaning her weight on them.
Completely ignoring what she said, Sam continued making vaguely incoherent but very excited noises until she finally managed to wrangle herself back under some sort of control as the waitress was coming back over with their desserts. After all, looking like an idiot in front of Charlie was nothing new. Looking like an idiot in front of a complete stranger was entirely unacceptable.
All things considered, Charlie figured it went pretty well.
*
Work that afternoon was busy and it left Charlie precious little time to actually think about what had happened and what it meant. She didn’t have any time to let her thoughts start chasing each other in circles like a dog after its own tail. And that was good, probably. If she had time to just absorb it without chewing on it like a mutt with a bone, then she probably wouldn’t be able to psych herself out about everything.
Eventually, maybe, she would be able to get rid of that defense mechanism. That impulse to dislike or panic about everything, because if she liked it then it was incentive for her dad to take it and hold it hostage until she did what he wanted. Still living like that even years after leaving home wasn’t fair to her or to the people around her.
But she didn’t have any time to ponder that either, as she shuttled trays and dishes and drinks back and forth, save for the moments when her pen was busily scribbling down someone’s order.
She always liked being busy in one way or another. She preferred when her thoughts didn’t have a chance to turn into a tornado. And really, they hadn’t turned into a tornado much at all for a while. She was more content with the ways things in her life were going than she had been in a very long time.
It was sort of amazing, actually.
*
She had a maid of honor. Charlie reflected on this as she returned to the penthouse, strolling out of the elevator. Realistically speaking, she had known she was going to from the get go (or at least once it had been decided they weren’t just going to quietly elope), but still. She had a maid of honor, for real, and that thought just made it sink in all the more that she was getting married. To Zeke.
With an excited whoop of laughter, she broke into a short dance in the middle of the main room, flailing and hopping and twirling and not even caring about the way Zeke was watching her in bemusement from the kitchen.
Evidently, he decided he didn’t want to know, as he just shook his head with a small, quiet smile and turned his attention back to whatever he was reading at the counter.
(It was an entertaining quirk of his, honestly. He would get distracted reading, and then rather than finding some place to sit down, he would just lean against the nearest available surface.)
Charlie loped over to him to burrow herself against his side, tucked comfortably under his arm. Zeke, for his part, seemed pretty content to let her stay there.
*
Of course, there were still things that they needed to worry about. There were still a few problems that needed a bit of ironing out.
When the first full moon after Charlie moved into the penthouse came, no one really talked about it. Neither Zeke nor Charlie wanted to bring up what happened last time. It wasn’t until Zeke was heading towards the elevator in the evening that he paused and said, “I’m heading out to the woods.” He hesitated for a second before he asked, “Do you want to come this time?”
Charlie was quiet at first, until she sighed slowly. She turned off the television and stood up, and she made her way over to join him by the elevator. “Yeah, alright,” she agreed, and it was as much a surprise to her as it was to him.
But they knew what to expect that time. They both knew that Richard would likely be in the woods, too, and as long as Zeke didn’t leave Charlie alone (and as long as Charlie didn’t go wandering off on a lark) then the danger was… comparably minimal, even if it wasn’t nonexistent. As it was, they both knew that Zeke would win in a fight; Richard had gone running twice already, and Charlie had no doubts that if it came down to a confrontation again, Richard would go running to save his skin once again.
She ran over all of this in her head as they took the elevator down to the ground level. By the time she was climbing into the car’s passenger seat she was reasonably sure that she would be safe. If she was lucky, she would be able to put most of her concerns behind her for the night and just enjoy spending time in the woods.
She was reluctant to get her hopes up, though. But the fact that she was comfortable enough with Zeke to trust him to keep her safe probably said a lot and she kept that thought with her during the drive.
*
Much like the last time, it still managed to take Charlie off guard, just how much the woods seemed like they were isolated from the rest of the planet. She couldn’t help but wonder if she screamed if anyone would hear her or if maybe that was why Richard had tried to get her in the woods.
(It was a silly thought and she knew that; Zeke would hear her scream, if nothing else, and she knew that realistically, Richard picked the woods because they both just happened to be in the woods at the same time.)
They explored absentmindedly at first, Zeke always a few steps ahead of Charlie, his ears swiveling and his nose constantly scenting the air. If there were going to be any uninvited guests, he would know about them before they showed up and long before they had a chance to get their claws into Charlie.
Those concerns faded surprisingly quickly, all things considered. The sky was beautiful. The woods were peaceful. She could hear crickets and cicadas, along with the rattle and rustle of leaves and branches and the quiet babbling of the stream in the distance. Like a balm to her thoughts, it chased off her worries, and left her free to just enjoy the evening.
Because really, there was something to be said for being able to enjoy a night in the woods with a bear. She didn’t know anyone else who could say they could do that. They had played it safe last time, just wandering around until Zeke needed a nap. But he had eaten enough of a caloric load earlier that day that transforming hadn’t completely knocked his feet out from under him, so he was alert and bright eyed and ready to stay that way for the whole night.
And Charlie, for her part, was actually looking forward to it. She didn’t forget the risks, of course. She wasn’t going to let that happen again; the last time had been enough of a warning against getting too complacent. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to enjoy herself as long as she was wary of her surroundings and as long as she paid attention to Zeke. Sure, he couldn’t talk, but he was still remarkably good at getting his point across.
So, with that thought, Charlie was determined to let it be a good night. If trouble happened, then it would happen, but worrying about it wasn’t going to make it less likely to happen. It was just going to make her more likely to have an ulcer by the time she was fifty, and she already knew she wasn’t going to have time for something like that.
She was going to have a good night. She was determined. Though she did sort of wish she could experience it the same way Zeke did, but based on everything he had said, she was pretty sure that he couldn’t actually turn anyone else into a bear.
A pity, in a way. She sort of wished she could hear and see things the way he did. But she was going to keep that thought to herself.
*
It occurred to Charlie after about twenty minutes of walking that the woods were very large. She supposed it was possible that they wouldn’t run into Richard at all, purely based on how much ground there was. Granted, she wasn’t going to get her hopes up, if only because he was most likely aware that Zeke and Charlie were in the woods again and he was probably actively searching for them.
Still, it was a comforting thought to know that the sheer size of the woods might offer them some protection.
*
Charlie was familiar with fireflies. She thought they were sort of cute, though she could never figure out why. Possibly because every time she found any in the past, it was because they were stuck in a window in the duplex, glowing and blinking as insistently as ever, despite the fact that there was no one else in the duplex to answer their glowing. Charlie usually did her best to scoop them up and let them back outside.
She had seen less of them since moving into Zeke’s penthouse, but she supposed that made sense. That night, though, there were fireflies everywhere. When Charlie and Zeke came to an area that was relatively free of trees and instead consisted almost entirely of ferns, the air was filled with blinking pinpoints of greenish yellow light as fireflies bobbed through the air, free as the wind and without a care.
Grinning, Charlie carefully strode into the ferns, holding her hands out. Catching some of the little guys was as simple as just scooping her hands upwards in the air, and just like that, she had three in each hand. Grinning, she looked over her shoulder at Zeke as fireflies crawled along her hands and arms, and she was pretty sure she even had a few in her hair at that point.
Carefully, Zeke lumbered into the ferns, sending fireflies and crickets scattering in every direction as the leaves rustled, until Charlie swore she would nearly be able to read by the fireflies’ light, if not for the fact that the crickets’ singing would surely distract her from whatever might be on the hypothetical pages.
Maybe it was a silly thing to be happy about, but Charlie didn’t much care just then. She just knew that it was beautiful and she would be quite content to stay right there for the rest of the night if she could. It wasn’t meant to be, though. Soon enough the fireflies vacated the little clearing, and while the crickets were charming in their own right, it just wasn’t quite the same.
She looked over her shoulder at Zeke, who was curiously investigating a hole in the ground, only to recoil when a terrified chipmunk bolted out of it and went scampering through the ferns. Charlie covered her mouth to muffle a snort of laughter, though Zeke swung his head to glower at her regardless.
From there, it was time to move on. They didn’t have any sort of set schedule or even any real plans, but there was nothing left to do there, and it was a big forest; there was a lot that they could do, and just standing around and lamenting about how there was nothing to do right there seemed sort of silly and backwards. So, Charlie broke into a lope, ferns rustling around her legs, and she carried on.
It was shaping up to be a good night, at least. She couldn’t complain about that. And while she hadn’t forgotten the possibility of Richard, at least she wasn’t actively worried about him.
*
Through a break in the trees, Charlie stared at the sky, watching the clouds drift past, briefly blocking out the moon before slithering away. It was nothing like the view of the sky from her duplex, and certainly nothing like the view she got from the penthouse. In the duplex, the sky had always seemed pale and it was always tinted orange in the direction of the city proper. There were stars, but they were small and dim and few. And from the penthouse, looking at the sky was a fruitless endeavor. It was too bright, leaving everything perpetually looking like twilight. The moon was visible and little else.
But there in the woods, the stars above were countless and brilliant, as if someone had smashed a chest of diamonds into pieces and thrown the fragments into the sky to glimmer and gleam. Charlie swore she could see an entire arm of the Milky Way reaching across the sky, countless and infinite.
She pulled her phone out and snapped a picture. She was sure she could think of some way to use it as inspiration in the future. If she couldn’t, then clearly, she needed to get her head examined just to make sure there was nothing wrong with it.
Her attention was drawn back to Earth when Zeke prodded at her curiously with his snout, and she tore her gaze away from the sky to look at him as he wandered up beside her.
“There’s nothing else quite like it,” she observed eventually, looking back to the sky once again. Zeke grunted in what she assumed was agreement and sat down, his head tilted back, and Charlie leaned sideways against him.
There was nothing else quite like it, and she was glad she got to see it with Zeke. And that she would get to see it again in the future. Occasionally, it was nice to be reminded that the world was a beautiful place to live.
*
There were a few things Charlie didn’t get to see very often, living in and around the city. Or a lot of things she didn’t get to see very often, actually. Among those things were animals. She saw raccoons and opossums, pigeons and birds of prey and some songbirds, and she definitely saw a lot of semi-domesticated squirrels and chipmunks. But she never got to see anything more out of the ordinary than that.
When she saw a fox creeping through the underbrush, she couldn’t help but freeze in her tracks. Zeke peered over his shoulder at her curiously when her footsteps stopped, and his gaze was drawn to where she was staring as the fox crept to the stream’s edge to get a drink.
Slowly, Zeke huffed out an amused sigh and the fox’s head snapped up. It looked straight at Zeke before its ears slicked back against its head and it turned and bolted away, a flock of crows taking off out of the grass as it raced by, abandoning whatever they were eating as they cawed noisily and scattered.
With a distraught, “Aw, no,” Charlie jogged after the fox, but to no avail. It disappeared with ease. But she didn’t have time to get properly distraught, as a deer bounded past, racing away from the sudden commotion.
It was huge. Well, alright, it was the size of a decent pony, but it was still bigger than she ever would have expected it to be. Kids’ movies had led her to believe that they were closer to the size of a dog, and she certainly wasn’t expecting the spread of six-pointed antlers that branched from its skull.
She stared after it as it fled, her eyes wide in wonder. “How does it not get stuck on the branches?” she finally mumbled to herself, reaching up to probe at the top of her head unconsciously. “How come it can just fit so easily through the trees?”
Behind her, Zeke huffed out a breath and gave her a prod with his nose, jerking her back to the present. She turned to keep following him, only to groan and turn away as he found whatever had so captivated the crows before and finished it off.
That was one part she was never going to get used to, she was pretty sure, and she was glad she did not need to take part.
(Zeke seemed to think her disgust with his scavenged meal was funny. Charlie was not a fan.)
*
It was sort of entertaining to watch Zeke bustle back and forth like a terrier following a broom. He knew Charlie was still around—she guessed that her smell was still in the area—but he couldn’t spot her. And maybe it was a bit mean, but it was honestly funny as hell to watch him pace back and forth and in circles around the area with increasing discontent as he tried to find wherever she had wandered off to.
It was only when he started grumbling and his irritation was pretty evidently turning to worry that she plucked a twig off of the tree branch she was sitting on and threw it at him. It bounced off of his head and he looked up at her as she laughed, “I’m up here, you overgrown worrywart.”
His grumbling took on a different tone after that, and with a huff, he stood up on two legs, his front legs leaning against the tree trunk as he tried to shove at her with his muzzle.
Not one to give up so quickly, Charlie climbed out of reach, hauling herself up to the next branch up. But Zeke was also not one to give up so easily, as he started heaving his weight against the tree, over and over, making the entire tree shake just enough that clinging to it was not the most comfortable thing.
Rather than climbing down to the ground once again, Charlie shimmied along her branch until she could grab the branch of a neighboring tree. She made sure her hold on it was steady, and then she dragged herself over to the next tree. She snorted out a laugh, muffled ineffectually behind one hand, as Zeke groaned and thumped back down to all fours.
It was a good half hour of climbing from tree to tree with Zeke lumbering along beneath her—sometimes standing up to get at her and sometimes just leaning sideways against the tree until it seemed like it might give out under his weight—before Charlie got bored of her game and finally shimmied her way back down to the ground, making her way down the trunk like some sort of overgrown squirrel.
As soon as her feet were on the ground, Zeke shouldered into her lightly. Well, ‘lightly’ in that he didn’t hurt her, but he did still knock her onto her back on the ground. She whined at him melodramatically for a few moments, but he was determined to show no remorse and she supposed she could at least grant him that much, as she climbed back to her feet and ineffectually dusted herself off. It wasn’t going to do much good; she was pretty thoroughly coated in the bounties of the forest.
At least it smelled pretty good. She sort of wished she could bottle the ‘just rolled around in a tree’ smell. Earthy and woody and sort of sweet from the leaves and the sap. Movies always made people who had been in the woods look as if they would smell like rotted sewage, but as far as Charlie could tell, everything just smelled like… nature. If she could bottle that smell, she would.
She would certainly be unique.
(She made a mental note to go shopping at some point in the near future. She had to remind herself that she could actually afford to shop in the more expensive district, and who knew what she would find there? It would be like a treasure hunt.)
*
It was a warm evening and it faded into a warm night. Warm enough that Charlie shucked her shoes and her socks without worrying about getting cold, rolled her pants up over her knees, and waded into the stream. She tied her shoelaces together to let the shoes dangle around her neck and stuffed her socks into her pocket, freeing up her hands to keep balance as the current buffeted her gently.
She had been swimming in a deeper creek in summer camp, but that had been with twenty other kids and counselors, the water had been churning and muddy, and they hadn’t really been permitted to actually swim, so much as they just got to aimlessly drift to make sure no one would swim too far ahead and drown, as if they hadn’t been wearing life vests.
Comparing the two situations… well, there really was no comparison.
It took maybe four seconds before Zeke hopped down into the water, and Charlie squealed as it sprayed in every direction. She found herself thoroughly doused, and she whined melodramatically for a few seconds before she shook her head quickly in an attempt to get her sodden hair out of her face. Mostly all she accomplished was getting her hair to stick to her face and neck. It was not ideal, but she didn’t care much just then.
She turned to face him, kicking water at him as if it was going to have any sort of effect on him. He yawned at her and then flopped down onto his belly, his resultant wave nearly knocking Charlie onto her butt in the water.
“You are such a prick,” she laughed, stomping both feet in the water over and over, just to splash his face a little bit. That at least got a reaction, as he grumbled and lifted a paw to cover his face. All things considered, his paw did not make for a great shield, and soon enough his head was dripping wet. Charlie couldn’t help but whip out her phone to get a picture of him with water dripping off of his nose, chin, and ears. He scowled at her, at least as much as he was really capable of scowling just then.
Still, it didn’t take long before being completely soaked started to lose its appeal, and Zeke stood back up and hauled himself out of the stream again. As if to offer it as one last parting shot, he stood right on the very edge of the ravine as he shook off, flinging water in every direction. Charlie groaned melodramatically and decided she wasn’t even going to bother getting out of the stream. There would be no point.
She walked through the water, following the stream as it meandered, and Zeke lumbered along beside her from just above the crevice the stream had carved into the ground.
It was just as Charlie was contemplating trying to catch one of the strange little shrimp critters—crawdads, maybe, but she couldn’t actually remember what they were called—that Zeke’s head jerked up. He started audibly sniffing at the air and his ears were turning every which way, and nothing about his sudden alertness boded well.
When he grumbled lowly, Charlie scrambled out of the water and up the side of the bank so she could tuck herself against Zeke’s side. She clenched her hands in his fur and craned her head back and forth to look around, to see if there was anything out of the ordinary yet.
She heard trouble before she saw it, as the underbrush on the other side of the stream started rustling, followed by the snapping of branches far too large for it to be something as harmless as a fox.
Quickly, Zeke dropped to a crouch and turned his head to prod at Charlie with his snout. She got the hint quickly, clambering gracelessly up onto his back. He was too broad for it to be comfortable and the only way for her to hold on was to clench her hands in his fur, but it was better than being stuck trying to outrun a bear on foot again.
Once she was on his back, they stood still just long enough to spot Richard watching them through the leaves, and then Zeke took off at a sprint, barreling through the woods as Charlie clung to his back for dear life, her teeth rattling each time Zeke’s front feet met the ground. She felt as if she was going to be shaken right out of her skin.
Zeke wasn’t going at his top speed, though. Instead, he waited until Richard had slowed to cross the stream before he put on an extra burst of speed, thundering along until Richard disappeared out of sight behind them. He had some sort of plan, evidently, as he seemed very set on some sort of goal.
When he stumbled to a too-sudden stop, Charlie nearly tumbled forward, right over his head. Zeke turned his head, tugging at the cuff of her pant leg until she got the hint and climbed down, and he nudged her into an alcove in the ground. He glanced back in Richard’s direction, heaved an irritated sigh through his nose, and then ducked his head into the alcove to steal one of Charlie’s socks from her pocket.
He backed up a pace and Charlie curled up into as small of a ball as she could manage before Zeke took off again, breaking into a run and gaining as much distance as he could before Richard could actually see him well enough to realize Charlie wasn’t on his back anymore.
Charlie held her breath as Richard stampeded past a few moments later, following Zeke’s path through the woods.
Everything was silent for a moment, and cautiously Charlie poked her head out of the alcove, peering around carefully. There were no bears anywhere to be seen, but Charlie had learned her lesson about wandering off into the woods. She pulled herself back into the alcove and curled up, making herself as small as she could.
She was just going to stay right there until Zeke came back to get her. She still more or less knew her way back to the car, in the worst-case scenario, but she was positive that wasn’t going to happen. Zeke would just lead Richard on a merry little chase until Richard inevitably ran off to go lick his wounds again.
*
There was a bang in the distance, thunderous and loud and unnatural. It was not a sound that was made in nature and it was not a sound that promised good tidings, and Charlie gnawed at one of her fingernails as she waited for Zeke to get back to explain what the hell was going on.
It was a very long wait. Charlie wasn’t even sure how long it was—maybe twelve minutes, maybe an hour, it was hard to tell—but it certainly felt like a very long wait, with only the wind and the bugs to keep her company in her hole.
She was very ready for their trouble with Richard to be done and over with.